Synopsis

In search of a new life, Reuben and Ardith Rosenfeld and their two children move from Chicago to the small town of Welton, Colorado, looking for all the hope that the burgeoning West has to offer—its abundance of jobs, space, sunshine, prosperity, and the promise of reinvention. Reuben, a former copyeditor at the Chicago Tribune, purchases the local town paper, the Welton Sentinel. Ardith stays home and copes with the task of fixing up an older house, which suffers such disrepair that on Halloween it’s mistaken for part of a haunted house tour. Teenaged Harry continues his life as a troubled loner, skipping school and losing his tooth in a mysterious encounter. Meanwhile, Reuben, unaware that Ardith is having an affair, worries about his wife’s growing unhappiness and distance from the family. One night, after a cookout at some friends’ dairy farm, a fatal hit-and-run occurs that shocks the community, exposes a secret, and begins to rip apart the Rosenfeld family.

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Excerpt

On Monday, four days after Tom died, Ardith drove to his house. She parked at the club and walked up the hill to his front door. He’d given her a spare key just in case she wanted to get away from the stress of her own home and come over when he wasn’t there. Too afraid to get caught, she’d never taken advantage of the offer. Now she didn’t care—or even knew that she should care. She turned the key in the lock and went inside.

The shades were drawn, probably as he’d left them before going to the party. A few of the plants had wilted slightly, though the house stayed cool. She tried to walk and not touch anything, as much not to disturb things as to pretend she wasn’t here so as not to feel his presence or hers with him. She went toward his study and stood in the doorway for a moment, looking in, half expecting to see him in his leather chair where he often sat in his boxer shorts and worked at his computer—while Ardith lay on the couch across from him reading, a T-shirt barely covering her hips. She could see herself stretched out, enjoying his admiring gaze, her legs extended for him. He would come over and touch her neck, tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, kiss her throat and the damp hollow between her breasts, caress the curve of her thighs, then leave to do something: make more coffee; put music on; check his messages on a landline that he let the answering machine take while they were together. Then he’d come back, and they’d talk or make love again, and time would both stop and fly by until she had to leave.

She knew his cell phone was with Wade and that by now the police chief no doubt scanned all their exchanged calls and listened to her panicky message wondering where Tom was. She figured it was only a matter of time before Wade contacted her. The prevailing numbness of her existence—her dreams were full of immobility—dulled her to that likelihood.

Upstairs, she wandered into the master bedroom and sat on the edge of the made-up bed with the duvet cover of midnight blue half-moons she’d picked out for him. Photos of him and his two daughters as teenagers when the family used to come out to Colorado for ski trips. Marian, with long blonde hair and a pretty smile, was the younger daughter. She had recently applied to law school at the university in Boulder to be closer to him. According to Reuben, who heard it from Wade, it was Marian who had come alone from California to make the funeral arrangements. Hearing about her arrival had riveted Ardith, one of the few times she’d actually engaged with Reuben in the last days, a situation that sickened her for its obvious selective attention and yet she could not stop. She soon returned to her stupor after Reuben gave her this news, until she’d gotten up the courage to come here today.

In the photograph, his older daughter, the one Tom had said never forgave him for the divorce, had ski goggles on and a knit hat pulled low over her forehead and looked incognito. He loved them dearly despite their anger at him, he’d said, and hoped Ardith would meet them one day. And she had wondered what had that meant? Did he imagine them—her and Tom—married and meeting his girls? Had he pictured their relationship as an open fact? Would he have taken her to Vail, teaching Ardith to ski as he’d promised? Was he going to ask her to leave Reuben? Such questions, ones she wouldn’t allow herself to consider before, were a ceaseless drone now. They exercised a selfish grip on her that hadn’t been there when he was alive.

She opened the top drawer of the bureau and gathered up the change of underwear she kept here. He’d given her the whole drawer to use, and more if she wanted, but she took up very little space. This one small drawer neat and orderly with a change of underwear and a pair of wool socks to pad around in represented all she had pretended was real about playing house here. If anybody had already been here to look through his drawers, they would rightly have assumed Tom had a lover. She stuck the items in her purse; they’d be one less clue as to their relationship, though could discovery be far away? She wondered if she should go to Wade and confess. And what would Wade say? He’d want to know how she fit into Tom’s life and what that meant for his death. She wanted to know the same thing herself.

In the bathroom she found her shampoo and the bar of Aveeno soap she used to keep her skin from drying out in Colorado, stuffing those in her bag too. Checking around one more time to see that no trace of her was left, she started downstairs. The front doorknob turned.

She froze, standing with her knee bent on the stairs. Again, the doorknob was rattled, and she backed up the stairs and into the bedroom, waiting beside the mahogany armoire, her heart hammering, her mouth pasty. She could hear someone walking along the gravel bed on the side of the house. A minute passed, then two. She heard a car start up outside and edged the blind to the side to see.

A patrol car—one of Wade’s officers driving. Wade must have sent him up here to check on the house. She let out a breath but instead of air, a loose cry broke from her. She went back to the bedroom, slipped one of his dress shirts off its hanger and slumped down against the wall holding the shirt in her hands. She buried her face in the clean smell—in the threads left of him.

About the Author

Steven Schwartz is the author of four story collections To Leningrad in Winter (University of Missouri), Lives of the Fathers (University of Illinois), Little Raw Souls (Autumn House), Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, and two novels, Therapy(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and A Good Doctor’s Son (William Morrow). His fiction has received the Nelson Algren Award, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, the Cohen Award, the Colorado Book Award for the Novel, two O. Henry Prize Story Awards, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Bread Loaf. He has taught in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and the MFA program at Colorado State University, where he serves as fiction editor for the Colorado Review. His novel The Tenderest of Strings will be published by Regal House in January 2022.

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